The meaning of life has not much to do with good and evil, right and wrong, duty, honor, country, or any of that. It has to do with cutting the right deal.

If everyone howled at every injustice, every act of barbarism, every act of unkindness, then we would be taking the first step towards a real humanity.

We're all pilgrims on the same journey but some pilgrims have better road maps.

I like the process of pencil and paper as opposed to a machine. I think the writing is better when it's done in handwriting.

There are Mafia families that have bought magnificent houses on the North Shore, although not yet the great estates because they don't want that kind of high profile.

I generally unwind by having dinner with close friends.

Somehow our devils are never quite what we expect when we meet them face to face.

Everyone looked pensive, which is good cover-up for clueless.

How you handle life depends a lot on how you handle plan B, or if you have a plan B.

…made me promise to cut down on the drinking and swearing, which I have. Unfortunately, this has left me dim-witted and nearly speechless.

I sometimes use some personality traits to fashion part of a character. Most of my characters are composites of either people I know or people in the public eye.

When I die of heart failure the next time you frighten me like that, you can put that on my gravestone—‘I didn’t mean to startle her.

Imagination is divine. Your imagination will lead you to where you ought to be.

I'm an invisible monster. I'm incapable of loving anybody. You don't know which is worse.

Actually when it comes to knocking the Canadian cultural scene nobody outdoes Canadians myself included. We are veritable masters of self-deprecation.

The atheist . . . destroys the chimeras which afflict the human race, and so leads men back to nature, to experience and to reason.

My mom said there's a sunrise and a sunset every day and you can choose to be there or not. You can put yourself in the way of beauty.

They still believe in God, the family, angels, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation, and other obsolete stuff.

When you look at what makes America great, what makes America, you know, not great, our ups and our downs, Springfield represents all of it.

To improve communications, work not on the utter, but the recipient.

Filmmaking is something I have to do. It's not something I particularly want to do.